Things That GOOSEBUMPS In The Night

Goosebumps, an energetic kid-friendly monster movie using R.L. Stein’s long-running series of young reader horror books as inspiration, is the best Joe Dante movie Joe Dante didn’t make. Sure, it doesn’t have his wicked satire (a la Small Soldiers or the Gremlins movies), but it shares with his sensibilities an expression of movie love, indebted to B-movie creature features and giddy with manic matinee action. It finds a small Delaware town overrun with cartoony beasts ripped straight from the pages of Stein’s books. That’s not just an expression in this case. Screenwriters Darren Lemke, Scott Alexander, and Larry Laraszewski’s conceit is that the author himself conjured these evil creatures with a magical typewriter, trapping them within the pages of his manuscripts. When a series of unfortunate accidents send his library fluttering to the wind, it’s a mad dash to save the day. The author of these nightmares is the only one who can wrangle them.

Jack Black plays Stein in a performance amusing for its oddball stillness, projecting light gravitas from behind thick glasses and deliberate movements. He clamps down his natural unrestrained comic charisma here, using a theatrical clipped voice that’s Vincent Price adjacent, ending up projecting a funny self-seriousness. I especially liked a running joke about his feelings of inferiority to Stephen King. We meet him as a standoffish neighbor who glowers at a teenager (Dylan Minnette) and his mom (Amy Ryan) who’ve just moved in next door. The boy strikes up a flirtation with Stein’s daughter (Odeya Rush), who we soon learn is forced to stay inside so as not to let her father’s dangerous literary secret out. But of course the boy’s suspicious of this arrangement, and totally crushing on the girl, so he calls a new nerdy friend (Ryan Lee) to help him investigate. Then, of course, the aforementioned accidents lead to a whole nutty chain of events and monsters everywhere.

As Stein and the teens scramble to make things right, the town is destroyed in a carnival funhouse of light frights and sprightly action, springing giggling good monster movie jumps and laughs with each new sequence. Confrontations with werewolves, zombies, towering bugs, nasty gnomes, wicked aliens, laser-wielding robots, an invisible boy, and more careen through a progressively more battered downtown, eventually converging, as all teen-centric films must, at the Big School Dance. Along the way, they encounter inattentive and ineffective authority figures entirely unprepared to help in such a strange situation. There are silly cops (Timothy Simons and Amanda Lund), a goofy aunt (Jillian Bell), and doofus teachers (Ken Marino), an ensemble fully stocked with ace comic character actors who are a little underutilized, but at least don’t wear out their welcome.

Fast-paced and sometimes inventive, the action sequences make good use of several typical horror movie locations: a locked house, an abandoned store, a cemetery, a school. The speed to the incidents and slapstick approach to unreal violence cackles along, making this less a scary story, more a rollicking adventure. A maniacal ventriloquist dummy named Slappy (voiced by Black, twisting his speech into a Joker’s howl) leads the various beasties in an attack on their creator, making for a fine villain to chase and flee, and eventually confront in a satisfying climax. The characters remain thin types – the hero, the tortured creator, the coward, the girl – but the quartet have funny chemistry, and fly through the film’s mostly sturdy construction. They hold their own against a flurry of effects and effectively staged stunts, including some nifty flipped vehicles. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe makes bright, colorful images dusted in a layer of mildly menacing atmosphere, creating a pleasant fall chill to the sparkling fun, with Danny Elfman’s bouncy score animating its gentle macabre spirit.

Director Rob Letterman, formerly of DreamWorks Animation, keeps the movie hopping along nicely with a slick, smooth approach that makes it all seem just the right kind of dangerous. It’s safe enough to be only fun, but chaotic enough to get carried away with its light popcorn thrills. It’s fast, funny, and enjoyable, pinned in only by its token emotional journey for the lead boy, who gets a deeply weird romantic payoff, and a struggle with grief that’s quickly dropped. Goosebumps is too busy having fun with its horror mash-up to stop for such mushy stuff, I guess. That’s just as well. It’s a fine evocation of the books (there are now nearly 200 of them) that were all the rage when I was in elementary school and continue to be popular amongst some kids these days, a movie mixing and matching its monsters to find appealing kid-friendly action. It’s not millennial nostalgia or children’s pap. It’s sweet crowd-pleasing entertainment with cross-generational appeal, casually expressing a terrific and, oddly enough, uncommon kid’s movie lesson: writing is great, reading is fun, and cultivating your imagination saves the day.

Snail's Pace: TURBO

Turbo, the latest family film from Dreamworks Animation, is stale and forgettable, but brightly colored and moves along at a brisk pace. I wish those colors and that speed told a fresher story or at least were put to use for something even halfway memorable. I better write this fast before the whole thing zooms out of my mind faster than a speeding snail. That might not sound all that fast, but Turbo clocks a snail’s pace at over 200 miles per hour. How’s that possible? The NASCAR fan snail at the film’s center (Ryan Reynolds) falls onto the highway and gets knocked into a tank of nitrus in a hotrod’s engine. A neat little sequence zooms all the way into the little guy’s atoms and shows them turning neon and zipping around faster and faster. Now he’s a super snail. Too bad he couldn’t be in a super movie.

In family film tradition, the speedy snail who names himself Turbo is alienated from his herd-mentality group of normal snails. They don’t understand his ambitions and therefore ostracize him, casting the fast-paced freak out of their snail habitat in a suburban garden. The poor fellow ends up with his still-slow brother (Paul Giamatti) at a failing strip mall in the middle of Van Nuys. There they are captured by Tito, a genial, bumbling snail racer (Michael Peña). I realize all that sounds a little strained and silly, but wait until you hear that the snail racer co-owns a Mexican restaurant with his brother (Luis Guzmán), so there’s double brotherly strife here. Turbo and Tito have big dreams that their brothers just don’t understand. Will the story bring all of these brothers closer together? Will dreams be realized, no matter how often they’re in doubt? What do you think?

The plot of the film involves Tito discovering Turbo’s speed and deciding to enter him in the Indianapolis 500. How, you might ask, does one enter a snail in a car race? Pay the entrance fee, of course. Tito raises the money from the strip mall’s other entrepreneurs (Richard Jenkins, Ken Jeong, and Michelle Rodriguez). They all seem to think that the exposure will reinvigorate their little corner of the local economy. Makes sense, I guess. If you’re going to be sponsoring a snail in a big car race, why wouldn’t you put the name of your business on the shell? Someone in Van Nuys might see that sign on that snail and think to go to your strip mall next time they want a taco. You never know, I guess.

There’s plenty of silly business along the plot’s sidelines involving the plain old slowpoke snails Tito brings along for some reason. They are a diverse collection of sluggish primary colors with the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, and Ben Schwartz. They’re the kind of cartoon characters that always seem to be smirking at you. I’m not sure exactly what these characters want, what their emotional journeys are, or even who they are, really. They don’t even get the typical one-trait sidekick development. By the movie’s end, they’re Turbo’s pit crew. Makes sense, I guess. There’s also a narcissistic French racing star (Bill Hader) who might not be so happy about racing a snail. Makes sense, I guess. You put in all that work to get to the top and some stupid snail is going to just zip by you like that? This is a movie built out of so many improbable plot elements that one simply has to stop questioning and go with it. The answer to any “Why?” would be “Because otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.”

But it’s a jumble of elements you’ve seen before, too safely crafted to either satisfy or fail, utterly predictable every step of the way. This movie about a snail racing racecars around a racetrack can’t even manage to be a little odd or unexpected. Director David Soren, who co-wrote the script with Darren Lemke and Robert D. Siegel, pulled stock character arcs, booming pop songs, and silly sight gags together and assembled them in an appealing package that danced in front of my eyes without every once engaging me on any level. It was simply there. I’d call Turbo the most forgettable animated film of the summer, but I’m sure I’ve already forgotten the most forgettable animated film of the summer.

The one truly notable aspect of Turbo is not necessarily the visually pleasant animation. We’re at the point where smoothly rendered computer-generated visual detail can be so blandly proficient that it’s only worth calling out for being truly terrible or particularly stunning. It’s fine here, that’s all, although I was charmed time and again by the neon blue streak of light Turbo trailed behind him at top speed. No, the only aspect worth noting is the film’s casual diversity. It’s appealing and admirable to have a cast of characters (the humans, at least) who are different in age, gender, body type and background without making a big deal about it. I mean, I’d prefer if they were in a movie that actually created characters out of them that were more than cogs in the all-too familiar plot mechanics, but it’s a start.

Hill of Beans: JACK THE GIANT SLAYER

When it comes to recontextualizing an old tale as a modern would-be blockbuster, Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer is way better than Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, but doesn’t even come close to the entertainment value of Snow White and the Huntsman. I suppose that’s the very definition of middling. I may not have liked it much, but it’s certainly not worth disliking, not when it’s so colorful and good natured, a kind of square, clear-eyed spectacle, a red-blooded adventure that wouldn’t have looked too out of place in the 50s with Harryhausen animation instead of blandly intricate CGI fakery. In this new telling, the story of Jack, the farm boy who trades his horse for magic beans which then grow into a beanstalk that leads to a land of giants, is the basic seed of story which sprouts into a typical hero’s journey complete with damsel so hopelessly distressed and a terribly modern extended action climax that drones on and on through noisy digital destruction.

But before it gets there, it starts simply, with a nicely crosscut sequence of a little boy in a farmhouse and a little girl in a castle, each being read a legend of giants and the king who forged a crown out of a melted giant’s heart to order them back to their realm high in the sky. The boy grows up to be Jack (Nicholas Hoult). The girl grows up to be the princess (Eleanor Tomlinson). She, through a series of events I shan’t relay here, ends up stuck at the top of the beanstalk when it smashes up through Jack’s small house. The king (Ian McShane) orders his best knight (Ewan McGregor) up the stalk with a team of men with the mission to save the princess at all costs. Among the group are the girl’s clearly villainous betrothed (Stanley Tucci, who doesn’t twirl his mustache, but might as well) and Jack, who has taken a liking to the girl and wants to impress her by joining the rescue party. He also feels a little responsible. After all, he’s the one who lost track of the bean that started the whole mess.

At the top of the beanstalk there be giants, of course. The giants’ world is a playground for standard adventure beats, with the men scurrying to and fro through setpieces that play with scale in all the ways you’d expect. There’s a smattering of silly visual moments – I especially liked one involving pigs in a giant’s oven – and a handful of fine action beats. The problem that Singer and his screenwriters Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dan Studney don’t quite get around to solving – until the charming, unexpected epilogue, that is – is how to overcome the feeling that we’ve been here before. If not literally here, then we’ve at least been in the neighborhood. The characters never rise to the level of even fully inhabited, memorable one-dimensional types. The plot never shakes off the feeling that it’s all just a thin fable that’s been blown all out of proportion and along with it, the tone’s gone all misshapen too. It’s at once oversized and modest, an odd combination for something so ostentatiously expensive, dripping with state-of-the-art effects that are what they are. The stalk vines its way into the sky with a convincing slither, the giants stomp with motion captured weightless weightiness, and the humans more or less convincingly occupy the same spaces as all of the above.

As the movie marches forward, with the humans and giants scrambling about in the forest in the sky and back on the ground the kingdom’s citizenry assemble a sort of Ace in the Hole carnival atmosphere around the stalk’s base, the tone grows into what, if I’m feeling charitable, I’d call relaxed, or, if I’m not, I’d call half baked. Still, it allows some of the performers to really pop. I enjoyed McGregor’s smirking swashbuckling and his delight playing his character’s personality as somewhere between a flip Obi-Wan Kenobi and an excessively dashing Errol Flynn. His answer “Not just yet,” to the question “Are we dead?” is one of the movie’s most memorable moments, as is his laughter in a later scene as he watches a giant get repeatedly stung by bees. In a movie with bounteous visual trickery, he’s the best effect. Everything else, from the bland leading roles to the broadly sketched supporting roles and all the borrowed fantasy frippery in between, is so much sleepiness that’s so close to being fun that it’s all the more disappointing for falling short.